Perception of Perfection

Each day us young women are bombarded with images and messages from society and social media telling us who we should be and how we should look. We constantly berate and put ourselves down on the basis of somebody else’s Instagram feed and the amount of followers or likes that person has.

Whether it’s a sweaty post run selfie at dawns crack on a Sunday morning (HELLO way to make me feel like shit for sleeping in on a Sunday!), the new designer outfit your snapped in at a party, or the piece of artwork you ate for breakfast this morning, us young women are all silently competing against each other in attempt to achieve perfection.

I was a self-proclaimed, hardcore perfectionist.

Whether it was the way I ate, the way I moved my body, the grades I got or the way I looked. I did everything perfectly.

I honestly believed that if I ate and exercised perfectly I would be able to avoid and minimise the painful feelings of shame, judgement and blame that I experienced a few years back.

The funny thing about perfection though is that it doesn’t exist.

Us young women all put on a mask, only showing the best version of ourselves to others. We look at our friends, strangers and celebrities who we believe have the perfect *body, hair, boyfriend, job and we put ourselves down. But HOLD UP sister! We do not see any of the day-to-day shit that is going on behind the scenes.

We do not see the fights they have with their boyfriends or their mum, or the days they binge eat and don’t get out of bed.

So why are we pretending that this does not exist?!

Why do we all suffer in silence?!

It was not until I started opening up and talking about my own problems and the health journey that I had been on that I started realising that NOBODY is perfect.

In fact I don’t know about you but I sure as hell don’t want to be perfect.

Perfect to me is sterile. It leaves no room for change, for spontaneity, for LIVING. When I was ‘perfect’ I was miserable inside. I was the most boring 21-year-old girl imaginable. If I wasn’t in control I wasn’t doing it. Which meant I spent most nights in my room, slowly pushing more people out of my life, as I believed they were getting in the way of my ability to eat and exercise perfectly.

It is only now through a lot of deep reflection that I realise there is soo much BEAUTY in imperfection. Imperfection allows for authenticity, vulnerability and connection.

The sooner us young women can realise the beauty in imperfection, the sooner we can let go of living our lives the way we think we are supposed to and start embracing who we actually are.